Patch Lady – a new ribbon for Office

In the last few weeks you may have received a new ribbon bar look. It’s a bit whiter and has more contrast than the old icons. If you think you accidentally clicked on something and think you messed up a view, it’s actually the new look being rolled out to some users. If you want to go back to the more classic view, you can flip your click to run patching schedule from monthly to semi-annual channel.

There is a user voice item that has (at the time of this posting) 575 votes.

Bottom line, it’s not you, it’s them. You didn’t do anything other than use your computer and get updates silently in the background.

In the last few weeks you may have received a new ribbon bar look. It’s a bit whiter and has more contrast than the old icons. If you think you acci[See the full post at: Patch Lady – a new ribbon for Office]

I stopped using Word when that horrible ribbon was forced on us. I got Open Office and have never looked back. I loved Word/Office before Microsoft ruined it with the ribbon. I’ve been happy with Open Office so Microsoft actually did me a favor as Open Office is free.

Have we really reached a time where the thing – UI colors – you used to be able to configure yourself is now an important item being delivered by the patch process?

Is this social engineering to try to get everyone used to everything changing unexpectedly? Long term de-sensitization and weaning from the expectation that you should be able to do something today that you could do yesterday without paying extra?

That certainly was one lesson of Orwell’s 1984 and its real-world totalitarian precursors: It’s in the petty details, as well as the larger issues, that those in control beat down people’s will to resist.

Good to see they’ve concerned themselves with the frighteningly important stuff like the way the ribbon looks. I’m so sick of them devoting 100% of their time to testing patches, updates and that eternal waste of time called “functionality”.

Time to jump off the 365 bandwagon. Lately the updates get bigger and bigger plus more frequent. I was under the impression that Office was meant to be productive. I might have been wrong here, this also became a pushy snow off we-know-what-is-good-for-you-product. Microsoft has lost not only its mojo but also the way. Just another tell tale sign: under macOS Office 365 is the software that gets the most frequent and by far the biggest updates of all installed software. Besides that it is also the slowest starting and closing junk. Sad, it was once slick and fast.

My most recent project was done from start to finish, not on Microsoft Office, but on Softmaker Office. They offer the customer a choice of interface–ribbon or traditional menus.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that the whole project was done on Kubuntu Linux? Softmaker offers their software for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android. Moreover, in their Kubuntu version at least, I can choose from a variety of UI color schemes too.

* Home users can use one license on up to five computers at the same time.
* Commercial users can use one license on two computers, as long as the 2nd computer is portable.
* Educational version is free.

Where did you learn about Softmaker? And how compatible is it with MS Office? Libre Office is very compatible, but not 100% compatible.

On the blog, they speak of “tablet computers”. I’m guessing that these tablets are not Android, but rather Windows or perhaps iOS, because they don’t say anywhere on their website that their software is compatible with Android. (They say MAC, not iOS, so probably iOS won’t work either.)

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Where did you learn about Softmaker? And how compatible is it with MS Office? Libre Office is very compatible, but not 100% compatible.

It’s been several years, I can’t remember when or where I first heard of Softmaker. It could have been a tech site, but I couldn’t be sure about that.

In my experience, Textmaker (the word-processing element of the Softmaker suite) is almost completely compatible with MS Word. Just about every aspect of complex files transfers back and forth without issues. The only limitation I’ve come across in my work was with one document that contained mathematical formulas created with the Equation Editor in Word and Textmaker didn’t interpret them well.

But by way of contrast, I’ve worked with documents created by others in LibreOffice, and when going back and forth between it and Word, we’ve had problems with soft carriage returns turning into hard returns, and with edits made in Word not carrying over.

On the blog, they speak of “tablet computers”. I’m guessing that these tablets are not Android, but rather Windows or perhaps iOS, because they don’t say anywhere on their website that their software is compatible with Android. (They say MAC, not iOS, so probably iOS won’t work either.)

Finally got around to updating my Retail Office 2016 CTR up to January 8, 2019 version 1812 and guess what? No new ribbon icons! Then I remembered Retail CTR gets performance and security updates but not Feature updates.

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